cool global BIZ

Sustainable Economy: We Can Make Money and Save the World, CalPERS & Ceres Say

 

 

"Global Changes" by ennor (Barry), under a Creative Commons license on flickr. Barry is a photographer and blogger in the United Kingdom.

 

THE MOST URGENT business issue of all is a green global economy. If the race and planet perish in a Malthusian nightmare, nothing else matters much, eh?

So heed pension-fund giant CalPERS, one of the world's most closely-watched large investors, and Ceres, a non-profit group that works with Fortune 500 companies and institutional investors with trillions of dollars in assets. (That's trillions with a "t.") Investing in companies based on their environmental, social and governance performance is good for business and the world, they contend, citing a Mercer study of many studies.

Of Market Manias, Financial Crises and Charles Kindleberger, or Why Can't We Get the Shit Right?

 

WHEN I FIRST started writing about business scandals and related topics, for a quick grounding I studied several first-rate business books, including  Den of Thieves by James Stewart, Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, The Money Machine by Sarah Bartlett, and others. For a run-and-gun lesson on market meltdowns and bubbles, the 1978 classic Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles Kindleberger was invaluable to a young journalist. Kindleberger, a late MIT economics professor and an architect of the post-World War II Marshall Plan, looked at financial disasters throughout history, from coin devaluation during the ancient Roman Empire to reckless lending by banks to Third World countries in the 1970s.

(Photo, above) The late MIT economist Charles P. Kindleberger. Photo courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum and the National Archives and Research Administration.

LinkedIn = $9 Billion After IPO Frenzy . . . It's Bubblelicious, Says Wall Street Journal

 

In a frenzy of trading during LinkedIn's initial public offering Thursday, shares climbed as high as $121, closing at $94 with a stock-market value of $9 billion. Video courtesy of Reuters, reported by Conway G. Gittens.

 

HOW DID THAT old Devo hit go? It's not too late / to flip it / flip it good. LinkedIn's IPO today? Call it dot.com deja vu. Or bubblelicious, as Wall Street Journal blogger Shira Ovide writes. Tech and Wall Street insiders cashed in early. Latecomers are stuck with jacked-up shares. And the bears are moving in, snarling for a kill. All for LinkedIn, a social-networking wonder that may be a good global business one day, but will never make money like the Intels and Apples of the world. LinkedIn's stock-market value today: $9 billion. That's billion with a "b." LinkedIn's latest quarterly net profit: $2 million. That's two with no zeros. And more Web 2.0 IPOs are waiting in the pipeline. If you're a regular Joe, you have a better shot at beating the house or playing the ponies. So go do dat, slick.

 

• MarketWatch stock quote and charts for LinkedIn.


• Forbes.com, "LinkedIn’s Stunning Public Debut Heightens Fears Of Bubble 2.0" by Eric Savitz.


• WSJ Deal Journal blog, "Mean Street: Faith Isn’t Enough for $10 Billion LinkedIn" by Evan Newmark.


• WSJ.com, "LinkedIn IPO Soars, Feeding Web Boom" by Stu Woo, Lynn Cowan and Pui-Wing Tam.


• Bloomberg, "LinkedIn’s Biggest Backers Will Own $2.5 Billion Stake After Initial Sale" by Ari Levy.


• BBC, "LinkedIn: A Social Network but Not for Losers" by Rory Cellan-Jones.

 

Updated May 21:

• NYTimes, "Was LinkedIn Scammed?" by Joe Nocera.

 

Updated May 26:

• MercuryNews.com, "LinkedIn Doesn't Mean We're In a Bubble" by Chris O'Brien.


• SeekingAlpha.com, "Social Media Bubble Forming: LinkedIn Shockingly Similar to Akamai" by Lee Eugene Munson.


• Time.com's The Curious Capitalist blog, "New Tech Bubble? More Like Tech Nation" by Roya Wolverson.

 

 

CoolGlobalBiz, May 19, 2011

 

Will Hardball Legal Tactics by Prosecutors Deter Financial Scandals in Boardrooms?

 

 

Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam outside federal court in New York. Video courtesy of Wall Street Journal's News Hub. Reported by Michael Rothfeld and Ashby Jones.

 

LEGAL WATCHERS ARE hailing the big takedown Wednesday of the Galleon Group's Raj Rajaratnam in U.S. District Court in New York. In the National Law Journal, former prosecutor Robert Mintz called it an "impressive" and "unprecedented win" for prosecutors, who used wiretaps and other hardball street tactics in the white-collar securities fraud case.

 

Global Currency War? Whither the Almighty U.S. Dollar? Any Other Deep Thoughts to Ponder as We Wander Through the Valley of the Shadow of -

 

Chief economist Steen Jakobsen of Saxo Bank AS warns about the U.S. dollar's outlook during an interview on Bloomberg Television's "The Pulse" with Maryam Nemazee. Video courtesy of Bloomberg (May 2, 2011).

 

Editor's note: This post was published late last year, but I'm re-posting it as the bruised and bloodied U.S. dollar continues to decline in global stature. The demise of the greenback will loom large in coming months and years, particularly during the 2012 U.S. presidential race, as candidates debate the economy, overseas jobs and trade deficits.

  

YOU KNOW, EARLY in any crisis, the contrarians always get ignored. Like the robot in the old Lost in Space TV show, they see Danger! Danger! Danger!, while others shrug and pooh-pooh the problem. Then the crisis smacks us, and contrarians can only yowl and yank out their hair. It happened in the tech dot.com collapse of 2001. It happened in the Enron era of corporate scandals. It happened with the mortgage meltdown. Or take the debate over global currency, please. Those good ol' contrarians have warned for years that one day, globalization could lead to the U.S. dollar losing favor. That one day, our almighty coin might no longer be coin of the realm. That one day, BRIC nations might not fear the greenback, and a currency war and monetary chaos could break out, like so many zits. You don't have to be Warren Buffett or even Jimmy Buffett to ask: Has that day arrived?

(Photo, above) Cast from the TV series Lost in Space (1965-1968), created and produced by Irwin Allen ©CBS, at Wikipedia.com.

  

The Global Quest for Egyptian Regime's Assets

 

CoolGlobalBiz, February 15, 2011

JUST AS EGYPT celebrates a new day, the global hunt begins for the assets of the last pharoah's regime. Good luck with that. History shows that tracking the money trail of autocrats and their backers is a Herculean task. Assets flow into a maze of bank accounts and investment holdings, under many names and businesses, in many jurisdictions. In Mubarak's case, the former Egyptian president was an ally of the West for 30 years, so the U.S. government and Congress might not look too deeply at the flight of capital from Egypt during his rule. Maybe other interested parties -- watchdogs in the Egyptian government, the United Nations food program, public pension funds, private investors, law firms and private investigators -- have been closely monitoring Egypt's finances. Beyond the search for assets, let's hope that the Egyptian economy -- energy, steel, tourism and other industries -- takes off in the coming years. Money still makes the world and democracies go around, especially after regimes no longer control the coffers. 

(Photo, above) "Cairo bazaar" by Ed Yourdon, under a Creative Commons license on flickr. Yourdon is a photographer and computer consultant in Pensacola, Florida, U.S.A., at Yourdon.com.

  

• CNN.com, "Where has Mubarak stashed his millions?" by Peter Wilkinson.
• NYTimes.com, "Mubarak Family Riches Attract New Focus" by Neil MacFarquhar, David Rohde and Aram Roston.
• WSJ.com, "Egypt Seeks Freeze of Some Former Politicians' Assets" by Stephen Fidler and Jay Solomon and "Egypt Asks U.S. to Freeze Former Officials' Assets" by Joe Palazzolo.
• NakedCapitalism.com, "Mubarak's Billions Beyond the Reach of Law"
• Telegraph.co.uk, "Hosni Mubarak used last 18 days in power to secure his fortune" by Philip Sherwell, Robert Mendick and Nick Meo.
• USAToday.com, "Posse Tracks Billions of Saddam's 'Blood Money' " by Edward Iwata.

 

 

Global Currency War? Whither the Almighty U.S. Dollar? Any Other Deep Thoughts to Ponder as We Wander Through the Shadow of the Valley of -

 

CoolGlobalBiz, Dec. 3, 2010

YOU KNOW, EARLY in any crisis, the contrarians always get ignored.  Like the robot in the old Lost in Space TV show, they see Danger! Danger! Danger!, while others shrug and pooh-pooh the problem.  Then the crisis smacks us, and contrarians can only yowl and yank out their hair.  It happened in the tech dot.com collapse of 2001.  It happened in the Enron era of corporate scandals.  It happened with the mortgage meltdown.  Or take the debate over global currency, please.  Those good ol' contrarians have warned for years that one day, globalization could lead to the U.S. dollar losing favor.  That one day, our almighty coin might no longer be coin of the realm.  That one day, BRIC nations might not fear the greenback, and a currency war and monetary chaos could break out, like so many zits.  You don't have to be Warren Buffett or even Jimmy Buffett to ask:  Has that day arrived?

(Photo, above) Cast from the TV series Lost in Space (1965-1968), created and produced by Irwin Allen ©CBS, at Wikipedia.com.

  

Visa's Dee Hock, Global Finance, and China's Sovereign Wealth Fund: It All Comes Full Circle

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60 Minutes interview last year with Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corp., by reporter Lesley Stahl and producer Shachar Bar-On.

 

ONE OF THE most visionary executives I've ever interviewed was Dee Hock, the brilliant founder and former CEO of Visa who lived in the green foothills on the California coast, near San Francisco. Before cash became digital, before business became virtual, this former Bank of America executive created that blessed and cursed thing, the international credit card, nearly a half-century ago. Go, Dee. A planet of consumers thank you. During our interview in the late 1990s, the retired and grandfatherly Hock -- who would go unnoticed at a party of today's Web 2.0 hipsters -- joked that his grandchildren ignored him, until they learned that he started Visa. A true business prophet, Hock foresaw the future of commerce in words and concepts that only he grasped before Visa was launched. The "cloud" and the Internet didn't exist then; the cloud was in his mind.The brick-and-mortar crowd missed it badly. But Hock knew that Visa and a world of global, borderless finance would be the future.